Hello! Welcome to the colourful world of Spirited Moonchild ~ a small arts, crafts and photography business located in the beautiful, rugged seaside town of Newlyn in Cornwall.
I'm a mixed media artist, inspired by my natural environment - frequently to be found gazing at nature, noticing small details that make up the world, walking along beaches picking up interesting pieces of driftwood and being generally fascinated by trees, plants, ladybirds and old stone walls!

Thursday, 18 July 2013

Does anyone else have this image.... that when you copy
something ready to paste, it's kind of stored in the mouse until you paste
it... or is that just me?! To gain a glimpse into my thinking process, if I saw
something I wanted to keep and wanted to make sure I can find it again
(somewhere on my computer), then I'll copy it (or a link) ready to paste
somewhere so that I can find it again. But if, in the process of copying, I
lose power to my computer, anything 'stored' in the mouse at the point where the
power connection is lost also gets lost. Following?!

Which reminds me of a funny story of when I first got a
computer (in the days before the internet... unthinkable, isn't it - I mean,
what the heck is the point of a computer WITHOUT internet?! No wonder I saw it
as a glorified typewriter!) - I'd just learned about the copy function.... and
used it to copy lots of the same symbols I'd found in an exploration of the
character map onto a blank page (yes, I really did that!) to save in case I wanted to
'cut' one out and paste it into another document.... YET... at the same time, I
also understood that when I started to run low of symbols (because of my very
own 'cut and paste' technique) I could then copy more of the remaining symbols
onto the same page to save to use next time! Why on earth hadn't my brain connected
with the fact that, if I knew I could copy and paste, I only needed ONE of each
symbol to do that?! Perhaps because my brain was used to the cut and paste
technique used in collage, and other artwork?!

Which leads me into a theory of mine, actually, about the
differences between left and right brain thinking - the left hemisphere, often
said to be more logical, analytical and objective (more inclined towards the
mathematical side of things), while the right side is more intuitive,
thoughtful and subjective (leaning more towards creative pursuits). Clearly,
from that, even though I am ambidextrous (meaning, I can use both hands), my earlier
'copy and paste' brain mentality showed a leaning more towards the creative
side of things and lacked a certain logic even when in possession of the facts!

Brains have always interested me immensely. I was 3 years
old when I tripped and almost fell when out shopping with my mother. I know
exactly where I fell because not only do I remember it, I still walk past there
extremely often (right outside Penzance Post Office!). I tripped over the curb, Mum
pulled on my arm to save me from falling. That was that. It was a week or so later when she
noticed I wasn't moving or doing anything with my right arm or hand. I then ended up
with my arm in plaster for 19 days and, for some reason unknown to me, I was
kept in hospital the whole time - but not in the children's ward, I was
put on an elderly people's ward where I wasn't even allowed to play with the
toys in the children's ward during the day time! Instead, as a little girl of just 3
years old, I played with my (weird looking) panda toy, Peter, that had
my name sewn into his ear and went round the old people asking for their tea
dregs so I could pour them into the teapot of my treasured tea set to pour out
into my little teacups and offer round again! I remember the old people chatting to me while they pretended to drink, being given Liquorice Allsorts, and watching as nurses came in and pulled curtains right round a particular bed, then the bed reappearing empty afterwards.

There's something more to it than that... my mum told me in
later life that she was once a secretary to a doctor who specialised in TB
research and that she'd been worried I might have it....which might explain
what I can see now was tantamount to being kept in isolation, in with those already on their way out
and therefore not posing much of a risk if I had, though I've never understood
why she thought that and can't ask her now. Incidentally, after 19 days of
having my arm in a cast, it was realised I hadn't broken it at all, but by then
I needed weeks and weeks of physiotherapy to get the use of my right hand and
arm back!

Anyway, point being - by 3 years old I was already using my
left hand to do things while my arm healed. Had I been using it before? I don't remember, but that's when I believe my ambidexterity first began to surface. It's a useful thing to be able to do and I believe it helps
balance my brain so I can be creative AND (largely, though as the above
illustration demonstrates - not always) logical (not at all that I think the
two things are automatically mutually exclusive).

It might explain why, when
people talk to me, I see their words in picture form and therefore need to
focus my eyes on a 'quiet' spot while I'm listening to be able to see it, as
eye contact gets too busy (by gazing into eyes you see into the soul which often
has a different story it wants told - and although I'm happy to listen to that,
YEARN to speak at that level, most often I've been informed I'm not paying
attention to what's being said!). It might help explain why I can smell certain
colours, why I am as confused today as to how a telephone works (nevermind the
internet) as I was as a child - visualising empty yogurt pots tied together
with a piece of taut string half way round the world. It might explain why,
when you talk about a certain type of creepy crawlies I don't care to mention,
there might as well BE one in the room and why I can't, therefore, bear you to
talk about certain things (some may say 'over-active imagination', but how
about 'good visualising skills'?!). It may also go some way to explaining why I
maintain a very child like view of my world, bordering on simplistic, and why, when my logical left brain hemisphere goes to name a thing like 'mini-weetabix', it seems to merge that information with my creative right brain hemisphere so that the words that actually leave my mouth become 'wini meetabix' (which just happened! I do that a lot!)... enabling both sides of my brain to be employed and happy!

Somewhere
along the way the two hemispheres of my brain 'married' or merged, or at least,
became very close friends. One did not favour itself over the other; BOTH are
employed to assess my world. I think that has distinct advantages.

And this is where computers come back into the story. Before
computing, only writers and secretaries (that's a bit of an educated guess)
tended to regularly use typewriters (once they were invented around 150 years
ago), everyone else used predominantly their left or right hand to write. If
anyone has ever seen the book 'The Way of The Artist' by Julia Cameron, you'll
know there are exercises to do specifically with the left hand in mind to help
regain or unleash creative talents and skills. This is because the left hand is
operated by the right side of the brain - the more creative hemisphere.

My
thinking is along the lines of this - with predominantly right hand writers,
it's predominantly the left (logical, linear, analytical, objective) brain
hemisphere being accessed, and the left and right hemispheres tend to process
differently any information coming their way. If you notice (always exceptions to
every rule though), the left handed
people I've known do tend to lean more towards the arts, music and creativity
in all its various forms. With the advent of computing as a way of life these
days, more and more and MORE people the world over are learning to write (type)
with BOTH hands (though I don't at all do it as I was taught in the few
typing classes I received)... which, surely, can only help balance our brains out?!

And maybe it's only because of the internet that we're hearing about all these things,
but more and more people do seem to be being more creative - my newsfeed is
FULL of creative, talented people producing astonishing work. More and more
people seem to have swung into their hearts too - feeling, connecting,
communicating, empathic - living less in their heads, perhaps?! Maybe the
internet - the very medium through which we now express ourselves so
frequently, allowing us to sit here, typing with both hands - has the added
advantage of not only connecting us all up, but is also enabling both sides of
our brains to work in mutual co-operation.

Sunday, 7 July 2013

When I was little we had an old garage to the side of the house. It was built of stone and had a huge wooden door at the front, though it was boarded up so no-one had access. It held Mum's 'things' from a previous existence - a life before my younger sister and me. Two things I remember most clearly - a large, very old grandfather clock - dusty and intriguing, even then I knew it held stories. I just never was sure whose. The other, a large dolls house. It would be worth a pretty penny today, had it survived. I never understood why, still don't to this day (and probably never will know now), we were not allowed to play in there. Whether she was afraid the building may collapse on us (it was old)?I guess, because access was denied (by almost unspoken rule), I never really paid much thought to what lay inside it beyond occasionally peeking through small gaps, but without much sunlight reaching its nethermost regions it was hard to see anything beyond dark shapes and the probability of large spiders, which I definitely didn't want to see. That is, until the day an annoying girl from along the road, one neither of us enjoyed playing with much (she had a habit of puffing talcolm powder in your face, or squirting air freshener or fly spray over you), appeared on the doorstep wanting to play. Perhaps Mum didn't know how to say no either, anyway, we ended up spending the afternoon with her. Deana Hill (I even remember her name) was the one who 'worked a plank loose' that day, while Mum busied herself indoors making jam tarts. We were able to peek inside this mystical realm behind the stone walled garage for the very first time. Deana, however, not content with just peeking, took it a stage further and squeezed herself through the small gap. Of course, now WE had to follow, if only to prevent her from walking off with 'Mum's treasures' (and yes, that was a distinct possibility). Oh the thumping of my heart as I followed her in, terrified of the prospect of being trapped inside there by an enormous spider guarding the doorway back out. There's probably some deep symbolism in that, given my childhood. However, that's when I first laid eyes on the grandfather clock and THAT'S when I first saw the dolls house. My sister and I would lie awake at night, talking about the dolls house. The miniature carpet sweeper, newspaper, bucket, mop, coal scuttle, mangle, jug, furniture we'd seen.... OH the hours we spent, dreaming up everything we could think of that could be in miniature inside that house. In truth, the dolls house would be rather disappointing in comparison with our imaginations, yet it mattered not one jot what was actually inside - for we were dreaming it up as we went along... What happened to the dolls house? Were we ever allowed to bring it indoors to play with? No, and I've never understood why. Eventually, after one gale force winter too many, we lost part of the corrugated sheeting off the roof one night, and once that happened, the weather crept into it. The dolls house rotted along with everything else. Sad but true.I've never forgotten, though, that 'hidden potential'... the joy of living your dreams as if they were real.